Data Point: Tablets Cooled Down in the First Quarter. Why?

The tablet market, which exploded after Apple introduced the iPad in early 2010, cooled down in the first quarter. Was that a blip or a trend?

When including tablets running operating systems from Apple, Google, Microsoft and others, shipments in the first quarter rose 19% from a year earlier, compared with 83% growth in the first quarter of 2013, according to data from Strategy Analytics that was charted by Statista. The chart above shows the breakdown of Android and iOS.

Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android dominate the industry. Apple shipped 16.4 million tablets running iOS in the first three months of 2014 (Apple’s fiscal second quarter), down 16% from 19.5 million the year before. That was still more than the 11.8 million iPads that Apple shipped globally in the first three months of 2012.

Apple now ships more than one size of iPad. Wall Street had expected Apple to sell nearly as many iPads as the year before, but CEO Tim Cooksaid analysts had misjudged the impact of pent up demand a year earlier as the iPad mini came to market. One issue that could be factoring into iPad shipments: Apple used to release iPads early in the calendar year but in 2012 switched to a holiday release cycle.

The market for Android tablets, meanwhile, is still growing — though at a slower clip. That makes sense given the market is flooded with the hardware. There were 37.9 million tablets shipped running a version of Google’s operating system in the first quarter, up 48% from 25.6 million a year before.

But that growth was much slower than the leap a year earlier, when tablet shipments quadrupled from the 6.4 million in the first quarter of 2012. Android has a much bigger share of the tablet market because, unlike the iPad, in part because it has numerous suppliers including Google and Samsung.